Devices designed to seat children at a table to eat with adults are well known in the art. When they are first old enough to sit independently without the aid of neck support, children (known in the industry at this age as toddlers) are seated at the table by use of a high chair.
Such high chairs have typically been free-standing devices employing a small, upper chair portion designed to fit such toddlers, a tray for food placement, and elongated legs to elevate the toddler to table level. More recently, the small, upper chair portions have been attached to arms which securely grip the table top to elevate the upper chair portion and tray to table level without the use of cumbersome legs.
While such high chair devices are satisfactory for use with toddlers, they are quickly outgrown by sprouting children. Children eventually become large enough to reach table level and eat off the table while sitting on standard adult chairs. The growth lapse between outgrowth of high chairs and use of adult chairs is typically about 12 inches in the child's height. Thus, for this growth period, arrangements must be made to boost the child up to table level so the child can eat off the table.
Toward this end, various booster seats have been developed which are placed on adult seats to raise the level of the child. The most common of these is a box-like device which includes an upper chair on which the child sits supported by a lower base.
While such a device satisfactorily raises a child to table level, it has several disadvantages. A great number of these devices are used by family-style restaurants to boost young customers. Typically, these family style restaurants have several booster seats. The box-like devices are bulky and take up a great deal of storage space.
A further problem with these devices is that they can only boost the young customer to a specific height. As previously seen, these booster seats are used by young children varying in height as much as 12 inches. In order to accommodate such different size children, boxes having different heights and upper chair sizes must be used. This adds appreciably not only to the storage space needed for such devices but also to restaurant costs.
Efforts to reduce the disadvantages associated with such booster seats have been two-fold. Initially, a number of booster seats have been designed specifically to stack on each other. Such booster seats typically employ legs or a base which in storage fits around or in the upper chair of a second booster seat. While such booster seats do decrease the storage space over the box-like devices, different size booster seats are still needed to accommodate different size children.
A second attempt at a solution was the inclusion of a second upper chair on the backside of the first upper chair of the box-like device to provide for different heights of boost in the same device. While this does reduce the number of booster seats needed, such devices are still extremely bulky in storage. A further problem is the devices are "one size fits all" and therefore a small child must use a seat area that is too large or a large child's seat area is too small.
Thus, what is needed is a booster seat that eliminates both the storage bulk and the size constraints of booster seats of the prior art. Such a booster seat should provide for use by different size children and still be nestable for easy storage. The present invention meets these desires.